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Reviewed July 13, 2026
What is mouth to nose ratio?
The mouth to nose ratio, called the naso-oral ratio in clinical work, sets the width of your mouth against the width of your nose at its base. It is one of the classic lower-face proportions that decides whether the nose and mouth look balanced with one another on a front view.
How It's Measured
How is the mouth to nose ratio measured?
The mouth to nose ratio is read from two horizontal widths on a front-facing photo: the mouth from corner to corner, and the nose across the base. Divide the first by the second and you have the ratio. The neoclassical canon ties the two together, holding that the mouth should be about one and a half times as wide as the nose (Farkas et al., 1985).
- Mouth width (Ch to Ch): the straight distance between the two mouth corners, the cheilion points.
- Nose width (Al to Al): the widest span of the nasal base, from one alar wing to the other.
- The ratio: mouth width divided by nose width, so a number above one means the mouth is wider than the nose.
Because the mouth changes little between faces while nose width swings a lot, most of the movement in the ratio comes from the nose (Naini, 2011).
Widening the nasal base dropped the mouth to nose ratio from 1.39 to 1.14. The mouth width held steady while the nose grew broader, so the ratio fell. Same identity, same lighting, same framing.
Why It Matters
Why does the mouth to nose ratio matter?
The mouth to nose ratio is a fast way to check whether the lower face reads as balanced. It survives as a working rule in facial surgery precisely because it is simple: the nose and mouth are the two features people fixate on below the eyes, and the eye notices when one crowds the other (Farkas et al., 1985).
Nose width is strongly sexually dimorphic, so the ratio drifts with sex. Men carry broader nasal bases, which pulls their ratio lower, while a narrower female nose pushes it higher toward the 1.5 canon. There is a catch worth stating plainly: a wider nose is not a flaw. Cunningham found that nose width at the nostrils tracked with smile width, and broader smiles read as more expressive, not less attractive (Cunningham, 1986).
The 1.5 target is a Caucasian-derived ideal, and it misreads faces it was never built on. Populations with mesorrhine and platyrrhine noses sit well below it, and treating that as a defect is a mistake the canon literature has spent decades correcting (Al-Sebaei et al., 2015). Read the cards and the table below against the face's own background, not against a single number.
1.3 : 1 to 1.5 : 1
Men
1.4 : 1 to 1.6 : 1
Women
1.3 : 1 to 1.6 : 1
Typical Range
Approximate mouth width to nose width ratio. The ratio is judged proportionally and shifts with individual structure and background.
Demographic Variants
Ideal Mouth to Nose Ratio by Demographic
Ideal mouth to nose ratios shift by population, because nose width varies far more than mouth width across groups. Each row links to the source that measured it.
Population | Ratio tendency | Source |
|---|---|---|
North American Caucasian | Closest to the 1.5 canon; most sit a little under | |
Arabian Peninsula | Nose-mouth canon rarely holds; broader noses lower the ratio | |
East Asian | Broader mesorrhine nose lowers the ratio versus Caucasians | |
African (Ibibio) | Widest nasal base, so the lowest ratio on average |
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Your Questions
Frequently Asked Questions
The neoclassical ideal puts the mouth at about 1.5 times the width of the nose, a ratio near 1.5 to 1 (Farkas et al., 1985). Very few faces match it exactly. In Farkas's own North American sample only about a fifth had a mouth 1.5 times the nose width, and most sat a little under, so treat 1.5 as a reference point rather than a pass mark.
Measure the mouth to nose ratio on a straight front photo. Take the mouth width between the two corners (cheilion to cheilion), take the nose width across the base (alar to alar), then divide mouth width by nose width (Naini, 2011). A result above one means the mouth is wider than the nose, which is the usual case.
There is no clinical cutoff for a bad mouth to nose ratio. A nose that is very wide relative to a small mouth pushes the ratio well below one and can look bottom-heavy, but width alone is not a defect and reads differently across populations (Al-Sebaei et al., 2015). Balance with the rest of the face matters more than hitting a target number.
Only weakly on its own. Neoclassical canons like the mouth to nose ratio are poor predictors of attractiveness ratings when tested directly, and a wider nose can even help because it tends to come with a broader, more expressive smile (Cunningham, 1986). Overall harmony and averageness carry more weight than any single ratio.